The Magic Circle

Game rules, therefore, create a kind of artificial reality in which those rules exclude other equally valid or defensible rules. In other words, there is no place for a chess piece in backgammon, baseball isn’t played with a hockey puck, a player can’t die in Candy Land, and there are no sugarplum fairies (to date) in World of Warcraft. The way each game’s rules and equipment combine to define the unique experience of playing that particular game is referred to by theorists as the magic circl...